God's Presence During a Tornado

A huge storm came pounding through our area one night while I was working on my interview for BibleWise. Growing up on the coast, I always loved huge storms. But since moving to central Texas, that joy's been dampened because the big storms here always come with the threat of tornados. As the storm became more and more intense, I decided I better stop my edits and turn off my computer before we lost power, which might hurt the computer. So I did.

Then I checked the weather. There was a tornado warning. I sat there thinking for a moment, "Wait.... Isn't that the bad one? Isn't that the one where they've actually SEEN a tornado? Or where the radar has picked up swirling wind?" And yes, indeed, it was. We were supposed to take cover immediately. Well, we have a house on top of a big hill. There just isn't any cover, and there isn't even a basement.

Fear seized me, as it generally does when I think of giant, spinning walls of wind rushing toward my house. But I turned off all the lights, walked upstairs to the windows, looked out on the flashing storm and thought, "What am I so afraid of?" Well, death was the obvious answer, but I was so close to God from having worked on the edits to the healing I was sharing about stress-related, intense pain that it was very clear to me that I couldn't be separated from God. And really there's nothing in this universe to fear but separation from God. And if you CAN'T be separated from God, then there's nothing to fear.

As I looked out the window, this thought of no separation expanded out because the storm wasn’t just affecting me. A tornado doesn’t just come down and take out one house. It barrels a swath through a whole city. So my thought broadened to include everyone in all those houses across the hills that I could see in the lightning and all those throughout the area of the storm. I prayed that none of us could be separated from God. All of us were safe.

I found myself still tense, but not terrified. I walked downstairs and talked calmly with my husband, and in just a few minutes (10 or 15 maybe), the storm, which had been raging for over an hour, calmed. Soon afterward, the tornado warning was lifted, and we could go to bed. I'm not saying I calmed the storm, or anything, but certainly the awareness of God's presence calmed me—and for that I am very grateful.